It's worth mentioning that going straight to the "questions" tab does not exhibit this behavior, only on the home page under the (default) "active" sub-tab. Switching to a different sub-tab doesn't do this. Navigating back to the "root" page goes back to the default sub-tab and everything is gone again.
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Jeff MercadoAug 31 '12 at 4:42

I can't quite read the ignored tag to understand for sure if you're just describing what should happen or if you really mean "I didn't ignore all these" in your freehand writing.
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Mark HurdAug 31 '12 at 5:18

What I'm saying is that the questions that are loading but hidden are questions that have tags that are on my ignore list. In the Arquade screenshot, I have tags containing "soccer" in them and other related tags ignored. With "Hide ignored tags" enabled, the homepage ends up blank and peeking at the hidden questions that are loaded, they are questions that have those tags. Same in the Code Review screenshot. I have lisp questions ignored but all that I see on the homepage are (hidden) lisp-tagged questions.
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Jeff MercadoAug 31 '12 at 5:48

@Jeff are you using any user-scripts? I don't even get that checkbox on the home page....?
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Marc Gravell♦Aug 31 '12 at 16:22

2 Answers
2

Stupidly detailed version: we've recently been doing some work to push some of our wildcard / synonym code down a few layers into our core tag-filtering logic. The homepage was actually being a bit naughty because forever it has been pushing those exclusion wildcards down to the tag-filtering code without bothering to expand them ... and in the past that wasn't a problem because the tag-filtering logic basically said "I have no clue what that means... I'll pretend I didn't see it". There was UI-level secondary hide/show logic, so this wasn't really visible (except maybe a brief flicker if you were watching really hard).

Now roll forwards to the last couple of days, where the tag-filtering code suddenly has a bit more savvy about wildcards... or, at least it thought it did. Unfortunately, it was expanding -*soccer (for example) incorrectly (in particular on the left), meaning: -*soccer could actually end up matching pro-evolution-soccer, pro-evolution-soccer-2011 and zombie-soccer... which looks right, until you realise that the all-important - on the left has disappeared. So that actually got interpreted as only returning those questions that included one of those three tags.... d'oh - obviously the exact opposite of what we wanted. Now add on the UI layer's secondary hide/show logic, which made the few questions that matched instantly disappear, and you have a reliable empty page.

Sorry about that; it now expands those correctly, to mean "and has none of these tags". As always, what a difference an innocent little - can make...

As a bonus: it shouldn't flicker now, as the data will have been correctly filtered at source, rather than at the UI.

P.S. if you're really on the ball (no pun intended), you'll observe that it is actually incorrect to include pro-evolution-soccer-2011 as a match for *soccer... that will be fixed in the next build ;p The expansion of *soccer* could be used if you also want to exclude that one.

Ah, that could explain why I couldn't see the same thing on Programmers, of the wildcard tags I tested, there didn't exist any tags that contained dashes in them. I probably would have seen that behavior if I used a wildcard tag on tags that did exist. p.s., pro-evolution-soccer-2011 didn't exist (AFAIK) at the time I added the tag or didn't show up frequently for me to notice. I figured it is being ignored because of some tag synonyms being applied to the filter.
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Jeff MercadoAug 31 '12 at 19:05

In other words it is working correctly: your ignored questions are hidden. Yes, it would be nice if the next page were loaded automatically, but the "hide my ignored questions" feature (hack?) simply applies a Javascript-supplied hidden attribute to the questions that were otherwise just shaded.

I can see now, when you don't hide the questions you do have normal questions displayed.

I cannot reproduce your problem with Chrome 21.0.1180.83 m. Questions are shown and hidden as expected for me.

The problem is all other questions aren't even shown on the homepage. It's not that there are exactly x amount of ignored questions that fills the page and I can't see any of those, nothing is shown. It's behaving like the situation where you search for questions and all you get are questions in ignored tags and you see nothing. That's understandable in a search but this is the homepage.
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Jeff MercadoAug 31 '12 at 5:53

Yeah, it looks like you've clicked on an ignored tag, except that would be noted on the RHS. And, in any case, they're not hidden now, when the tag is selected.
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Mark HurdAug 31 '12 at 6:06